Things are beginning to come for Auroville (Mother points to several written notes); there are many, many others, but there is above all the internal financial question: I would like there to be no money within Auroville (we would have to work out something), I would like money to be retained only for relations with outside. But that I haven’t written; I wrote something else (Mother gives a first note). This I have told you several times:
“Auroville wants to be the cradle of the superman.”
Then, this one:
“Auroville, the free international township. No army, no police….
Bravo!
“…They are replaced by a battalion of guards, consisting of
athletes and gymnasts.”
Oh, all this is splendid!
It’s for now. It’s to be done now.
Yes, no army, no police. Oh, yes!
And then (Mother points to a third note), this is for entry, because there’s a port in Auroville, so naturally entry is free, but conditional: we have no borders, no walls, we’re overflowing in India, so I can’t impose my law to the whole of India (!), but it will be replaced by a control at the port: we’ll let in only what can be consumed within Auroville—so as not to be used as a clandestine entry for a deluge of free goods.
(Satprem reads)
“No customs, but permission to import granted only for goods meant to be consumed in the town.”
That’ all.
Yes, to avoid smuggling with the rest of India.
Yes. If people were honest, it would be fine, but they aren’t!
No police and no army.
Yes, that’s fine!
So it gives physical education a deep raison d’être: people capable of stopping fires, saving drowning people and so on. There needn’t be many: if there were five hundred of them, it would be enough for the entire town, in little groups going about like that.
Dr. S. also has some ideas to replace jails (because we don’t have jails, and we can’t dump all the dishonest people into the rest of India! That wouldn’t be nice). Prisons and old people’s homes would have to be replaced with something…. It’s being studied, something has been found. It’s going to be interesting!
And one last thing: a place where all the children could be kept when their parents don’t want to look after them, or don’t look after them properly. And all of it with no possibility of accident or flight—but no prison or hospital, none of that sort of thing.
It’s being worked out.
(silence)
North of Pondicherry, there are places by the sea where nothing could ever be done (they’re constantly flooded), but there’s a way to make use of them, so I am trying to get the government’s permission to occupy it all. If we can get all of it, then we can have a free port, a free airport, an airfield (but more inland), also cultivation based on the new methods of irrigation with sea water, and naturally the transformation of sea water—but they’ve found something to transform sea water into drinkable water (Mother takes a brochure by her side). It’s French, I think, and an economical method; it’s very interesting. It’s under way, and if we wait for a few more years, they’ll have perfected it quite well.
(long silence)
I spent a good part of the night (almost the whole night till 3 in the morning) with Sri Aurobindo, and he not only showed me and explained to me, but he himself WAS what he was showing me: he was preparing himself for the new creation. And last night he told me, he showed me how this or that thing would be, how the body would be. I remember that when I woke up, he was lying down on a bed, I was kneeling beside the bed, looking at him, and while he was that new body, he at the same time explained to me how the superman’s body would be (the supramental being).1 And it was so living that even when I woke up, it remained—I can still see it. But the details… (how can I put it?) the memory doesn’t have the precision that enables it to explain (I don’t know how to put it). I still have the vision… it had a color… it wasn’t casting rays of light, not that, but… and not luminescent like an object, but with a special luminosity which had that light… a little like Auroville’s flower (but it wasn’t like that, it looked perfectly natural). He was showing me his body; he was lying down, and showing me his body, saying, “Here is how it is.” The form was almost the same, with some… I still have the memory there (gesture in the atmosphere), but I don’t know how to explain…. Lately, I had been wondering, “It’s odd, we don’t at all know how it [the new body] will be.” And I was saying to myself, “There’s no one to tell me.” Because this Consciousness that came, it acts through the consciousness, but not so much through the vision. So then, I had that last night. For a long, long time I was with Sri Aurobindo, a long time, for hours.
It has entered the consciousness, it will come out again one day But I kept the memory of the last thing: I saw myself, I was in two places at the same time (and maybe I too wasn’t quite as I am, but that didn’t interest me: I was looking at him, who was lying down and explaining to me), and it was… it was the same thing as a luminescent body, but it wasn’t luminescent, it was… if I am not mistaken, it was the color of this sari (Mother points to Sujata’s sari), something like that.
Orange?
No… It’s a pink with a golden glow, you understand. So the two are seen together, like this (gesture of fusing together).
(long silence)
It’s amusing…. I am trying my best to give a direction to the government here, and Indira is very open, but then the mass of the population says, “She has become a Communist!” while the Communists say, “It’s a bourgeois government!” It’s quite amusing, because it shows the exact attitude of the two parties towards Sri Aurobindo’s ideas!
(silence)
What are you bringing me?
I had yesterday a long and interesting conversation with a nineteen-year-old boy who took part in the “May revolution” in Paris;2 he was one of the students’ Communist leaders…. He read that little text I wrote, which I called “The Great Sense,” in which I try to say the true sense of things, which is neither in violence nor in nonviolence, but “something else.” He is a Communist, but he was very moved, he was deeply touched and called everything into question. So I tried to explain to him what you once told me, that idea of a silent, immobile revolution:3 hundreds of thousands of students who refuse, who don’t move and say, “We’ve had enough of degrees, enough of the present structure of society, enough of being engineers or doctors or anything—we want something else.”
Did he understand?
Yes, he understood. It sank in, it was like a sort of revelation.
Ah!
Was there a lot of violence in France?
Yes, that revolution, which at the start was really moved by a divine force, was immediately spoilt by violence. So I explained, “If you want the future, well, you have to use the means of the future. And the means of the future isn’t guns, it’s inner means—the inner power. If you want something else, well, call that something else.”
Yes.
“And it will answer….” It was very amusing, all his structures were blown away… in simplicity.
That’s right.
Before the simplicity of the thing.
Yes, that’s right.
Ah, I had an experience like that (I don’t know if it was this morning or yesterday morning or in the night, but anyway). For some time, I was in a consciousness in which the separate individuality no longer existed, but the principle… (how should I Put it?) the particular principle of each individual persisted in the universal Consciousness. And then, mon petit, everything became so marvelous!… It lasted maybe for an hour, a little more or a little less, I don’t know, but anyway long enough to… (Mother smiles), I mean, to lounge in it. There was no more, NO MORE separation, that had disappeared, but a certain… (how to explain?), almost like an outlook; each individual’s outlook (not just the outlook, but at the same time the stand in action—“stand,” that is, the part of the action initiated by that outlook), that persisted. It persisted in the One—no separation. And then, each thing has its own place—with the whole marvelously effective. At the same time… I can’t say, words are impotent. At the time of the experience, I remembered a sentence of Sri Aurobindo in which he said that in the end, the Lord is only a child at play (you know it, he put it in a certain way4), and I understood WHY he used those words, it was… it was something… which our language obviously can’t formulate, but to LIVE in that, to live that is… you understand, it’s the impression of so, so perfect an omnipotence, so harmonious, and at the same time, yes, so harmonious that it’s all smiling. It’s inexpressible. Inexpressible. I had the experience, then it went away It got mixed up with the daily work.
And I remember… It’s interesting because while I was in that state, I remembered the question you’d asked me about Pavitra, whether the principle of individuality persists; so something in me said to you, “Now you see, it’s like this!” (Mother laughs) I remembered your question, I said, “It’s like this, there is NO MORE separation, but… but this marvel of complexity remains—the marvel of a complexity.” And the impression is that everything, but everything that is has its own place, but when it’s in its place, then it’s perfectly harmonious.
Oh, it was… it was a real revelation.
I think all those experiences are part of the consciousness of the supermind, the superman (what name will he give himself? We don’t know).
It was this morning, after my night with Sri Aurobindo, and it was there (Mother points to her bathroom). I was doing something else, but it doesn’t matter in the least—the marvelous thing is that those experiences don’t demand that all the rest should stand still! They come, you can go on doing something, and at the same time you see yourself doing it, it’s quite funny… It was this morning (not long ago). I had a beginning of it yesterday, then the night’s experience, and then this morning…
Well, that’s worth living.
The impression is, “Yes, this is life! This is something.” All the rest is… All the rest, even the body, constantly feels as if it’s knocking against obstacles: lack of understanding, unresponsive things. It constantly feels it’s knocking about like that, and then, there you are this (vast, all-encompassing gesture).
Well, a being who lives constantly in that state… And I saw, I told you, I saw: the body was doing something else, that’s no hindrance—no hindrance. You see, I was even able to remember something you had said. All of it together.
Maybe that’s how the superman will be?…
(silence)
He will have a power to change life.
Mother actually said "the overmental being." This confusion will often take place, probably because Mother found this vocabulary quite cumbersome. But this next being clearly has nothing to do with the overmind or the world of the gods. ↩
In May 1968, the student uprising in France. ↩
See Agenda IX of 22 May 1968. ↩
"What is God after all? An eternal child playing an eternal game in an eternal garden."
Thoughts and Glimpses, 16.381 ↩
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